He follows (old) USDA dietary recommendations, which stipulate no saturated fat, and 60% carbs. That is really, really bad. The ultimate reference is "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes - it is meticulously researched and referenced, and is likely 40 years more up-to-date than your nutrition or medical professional.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is often based on incomplete science. It certainly does not make sense when viewed through the lens of some of the largest human dietary studies ever performed (such as the China Study; which Taubes "debunked" in his own unique fashion, but he can't alter the fact that it's among the best, longest, widest, and broadest studies of human diet available; to ignore it is to ignore good science and put your faith in hunches, which Taubes has a lot of).
The Japanese diet is one of several high carb diets that leads to excellent health and longevity. Many of the most successful regional diets are based heavily on rice, legumes, and vegetables, and are very carb-heavy. Ignoring those historically successful diets requires either an extremely myopic view of diet, or someone who has a controversial new book to sell.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that following Taubes advice would necessarily be a bad thing. He recommends whole foods, and cutting out sugar and simple carbs and processed foods, which are excellent dietary choices to make. Most Americans would get healthier by eating as Taubes recommends. But, to claim that a low-fat, high-carb, diet is unhealthy, when there are mountains of evidence to the contrary in the form of several Asian and Mediterranean diets, is misleading, at best. The problem with the American diet is not in any one macro-nutrient...fat or carb. It is that we, as a people, eat garbage at every meal. Processed, sugared, stripped of everything good and injected with everything bad. 80% of the food at a supermarket is probably something humans shouldn't be eating, even in moderation, but most of us eat it daily and as the primary source of calories.
Taubes is another fad diet promoter. His fad diet is better than most, and has some decent science behind it. But, it's not the ultimate reference, and it's not on my list of books to recommend to people who just want some ideas about how to eat better (I recommend In Defense of Food for that; it's anti-fad, free of hyperbole and outlandish claims and is based on tradition and science).
His premise is simply that for the vast majority of people who are obese, the culprit is located within the high-carbohydrate aspect of their diet.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is about why the "garbage" people eat has caused them to get fat, and why it's not the saturated fat like experts have been telling the public for a generation.
It's not a book about the best way for everyone to eat like Michael Pollan's books are. If you believe it's about telling people "eat food, but not too many carbs" I understand why you think little of it.
It's hard to know enough to say definitively what the culprit is. That's why Taubes is mostly content to argue merely the cause of increased obesity is located within the high-carbohydrate aspect of the modern diet. But even that has been a controversial enough position.
The problem could be primarily that the Kool-Aid, fruit juice, Tang, soda and Sunny Delight (and other sweet food like sugared-up yogurt and maybe even infant formula) that we've been feeding our kids for the last sixty years has halfway burned out many of their metabolisms while they were still young. It may have nothing to do with wheat. But we can be quite sure that the suspect(s) is a carbohydrate.
If that's so, those folks with a permanently injured insulin response will have a need for an appropriate diet, which may not be like what metabolically-healthy individuals can enjoy. Taubes takes the position that the most effective diets for them are ones which restrict some or all carbohydrates, which is not going to give you clogged arteries like the medical establishment has been saying.
That's about it. There are definitely other places you can go (i.e. the Heart Scan Blog) if you want to see arguments for wheat as a demon of the modern diet. Yet again, that also interacts with the modern insulin resistance that wasn't as much of an issue in the 1920's.
But we can be quite sure that the suspect(s) is a carbohydrate.
How can we be so sure? The most obvious culprit is total calories. From 1980 to the present, total caloric consumption increased by 500 calories/day (see table 1 of my report). Coincidentally, obesity increased over the same period. But lets ignore that.
Carb consumption decreased, both as a fraction of diet and in absolute numbers. Obesity increased. Taking these two facts together, you need to make a very convincing argument that carbs are really the problem, in spite of the fact that obesity and carb consumption are negatively correlated.
First off, I think this is good data and commend you for going back to the numbers to make your point. It's not perfect data - as the report says, by nature it's overstating actual consumption - but for short-term trends it is valuable.
But I don't see where gross carbohydrates are decreasing in Table 1. It seems like they went from 420g in the 80's (from under 400g in the 70's) to 480 or so a decade ago.
Taubes argues from the perspective of percentage of total intake. I suppose someone arguing with him could do the same. I tend to prefer the idea of discussing absolute consumption, as you've done, and when we look at it that way, Americans are eating more of everything, across the board: More fat, more sugar, more carbs, more white flour, more pasta, more sodas, more fruit, more meat, etc.
The simplest explanation is that we eat too much. Taubes often argues that's not true, and comes up with elaborate theories about insulin response and such to indicate that we eat too much not because we're gluttonous and too rich for our own good, but because we are victims of some hyper-fattening food (carbs). Taubes theory is a hunch, based on incomplete science. This was the point of my comment way up there at the start of all this. His theory might have some validity. But, you can't simply wave away the fact that we have vast data indicating that a high carb, low fat diet, can be extremely healthy and not lead to weight gain. In fact, the best evidence we have today from large populations indicates that a low-fat, low-sugar, high fiber diet, like that eaten by the Japanese until very recently or in some Mediterranean regions, is probably the best we can do for health and longevity.
It will take a lot of science to convince me that flipping that on its end and making saturated fats and animal proteins a core part of your diet is healthier (or even healthy, at all, though it does appear to be dramatically less dangerous than the American scientific establishment would have us believe).
Anyway, I don't know if Taubes is right or wrong about his insulin and carbs conspiracy theory. I do know, however, that our food production industry has figured out how to cram a lot of calories into foods with little to no nutrition. So, skip the processed/packaged foods. Eat more whole foods. More fresh/frozen produce. Stop buying things that are unrecognizably separated from their original form. i.e. if it started out as a pile of corn and some other ingredients and is now a can of Coke, a snack cake, a donut, a breakfast bar, a "chicken" nugget, or a "whole grain" breakfast cereal; skip it; it's probably not really food and is probably a net negative for your health.
Hmm. Maybe Gary Taubes has changed his approach, because in a typically-logorrhetic blog post last year, he went on about why low-fat calorie-restricted diets work exactly because the "absolute amount of carbohydrates consumed goes down."
Sorry, I meant a decrease from 1909-1919 to the present. I was definitely unclear, sorry about that. You are right, total carb consumption did increase since 1980.
But if carbs were the issue, shouldn't we have been fat in 1909-1919, thin in the 80's, and fat again?
I think it's troublesome to compare general disappearance data from so long ago. There can be long-term trends of things like waste and changing methodologies that mess things up.
I think your point -- that overall carbs are not the issue -- is right on, though. Looking at wheat data from Statistics Canada going back about as far, people seem to have been eating a ton more wheat a hundred years ago than they do today, like 30% more. And yet in those days obesity had a <1% incidence, by some accounts.
I think that's not inconsistent with fingering particular carbohydrates (and even the way they're consumed) as the cause of modern weight problems. That is, I don't think that falsifies the Sunny Delight hypothesis I proposed earlier. There's a reason the Kool-Aid Man is that large -- as mentioned by others, it seems like fructose is the trans fat of carbohydrates.
And, I would say, food disappearance data doesn't help at all in answering the question of the best way for the obese to lose fat. After all, in the 1910s, there almost weren't any obese people! Now that over a third of Americans are statistically obese, this is its own highly relevant issue.
For the record, I realized something interesting about wheat consumption in the USA, which is that sugar follows wheat very often in the modern diet. It's very challenging to find packaged sandwich bread in a USA supermarket which doesn't contain a significant amount of sugar or HFCS. So today, wheat consumption tells you a lot about sugar consumption, but that may not have been the case a hundred years ago.
I'm not a nutritionist. My understanding, however, is that sugars are the culprit. When you look at what has changed over the years, that's the big one.
There are lots of other articles concerning this, but I felt this was the best one for pure information. He's not alone in discussing this, so I don't have to just take his word for it. But like I said, I'm not a professional in this area.
Actually, if you look, you'll discover fats and oils have increased more than sugar. Consumption of fats and oils increased 90% (from 12.6% of diet to 23.9%), while sugar consumption only increased 34% (from 12.9 to 17.3%).
(By "increase", I mean from 1909-2004. See table 4 of my link.)
If between fats and sugars, one is "bad" and the other is not, then any increase in the one that is bad will have negative effects regardless of how much the non-bad one is increased. Nutrition and human biology is obviously more complicated than just this, but I'm just pointing out that data like this provides as much evidence for Jason's argument as it does for your argument.
Also, FWIW, I have seen the video, and to me the main message was that fructose is bad when fiber consumption is too low.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's the increase in the fructose in our diet via juices and sugars. Be wary as well, as those charts lump different things together.
Gary Taubes is a journalist, not an expert in nutrition. He also has a track record of questionable academic honesty. He's an excellent writer who has cashed in fabulously on fad diets, particularly the Atkins craze 10 years ago. Follow his advice at your own risk.
I've started reading this hit piece, and saw, e.g.
> "One can lose weight on a low-calorie diet if it is primarily composed of fat calories or carbohydrate calories or protein calories. It makes no difference!"
Quoted from one of the "experts" refuting taubes. And yet, research by Robert Israel and Michel Cabanac (full list of references in Roberts' "What Makes Food Fattening" bibliography) shows that this is completely untrue - even flavor makes a huge difference, let alone "caloric intake". (BTW, if anyone can point me to any peer reviewed paper that validates "calories in-calories out" theory, I would be thankful. It appears to be an argument of faith, not of science, as far as I can tell).
Good Calories Bad Calories is meticulously referenced. You may disagree with the content, but as far as science writing goes, it doesn't get any better or more rigorous.
(And that's less of a compliment to Taubes, and more an indication of the sad, sad state of science writing).
Taubes is a scientist and a journalist. The fact that nutrition is not his original field doesn't change much.
The problem wasn't just Taube's penchant for taking extremely selective evidence and his own hunches over the vast majority of the available research evidence.
The problem is many of the very scientists that Taubes referenced were furious about him misrepresenting their work, and taking extremely selective quotations to make it sound like they were supporting theories that they did not actually believe were true.
>"Taubes is a scientist"
The claim that Taubes is a scientist is unsupported by anything I've ever read about him, or his current wikipedia file. What science has he actually done, as opposed to reported on?
RE calories in / calories out:
Here's article might interest you. It details a nutritionist's "twinkie diet". He dropped 27 lbs in two months, shed body fat and improved various blood markers while eating 1800 calories a day, mostly from junkies. It's not a peer reviewed study, but it was conducted by a professor of nutrition at the university of Kansas. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
> I imagine you have a more nuanced point, but the statement you quoted is clearly true taken for what it actually is saying.
You are right, of course. Without quantifying (how low is "low calorie"?) these statements are useless.
There was an experiment in Mass General some 15 years ago, in which they were able to get people with similar lifestyle/activity on 1500 cal/day diet. About one third lost weight, one third stayed the same weight, and one third gained weight, depending on how exactly the diet was composed.
Yes, you will lose weight, regardless of diet composition, on less than 800 kcal/day. Is that "low calorie"? "too low calorie"? "moderate"?.
No, you will not necessarily lose weight on more than 800 kcal/day. You probably will if your diet was not specially crafted to make you keep your weight on 800 kcal. When you get up to the 1200-1500 range, there is a non-negligible probability of "accidentally" gaining weight (or at least not lose it) by randomly stumbling on a bad diet composition.
One of Cabanac's (If I'm not mistaken) experiment was able to make rats gain weight for 3 weeks on a diet of water+chalk (caloric value 0) for a while, by feeding them water+sugar+chalk for a while, and then dropping the sugar. Sure, it was water gain - but the calories in - calories out theory fails so miserably in this case (and countless others) that it cannot be taken seriously. (For only 3 weeks for a rat; it might not hold for a human for a few months in similar conditions).
The calorie accounting is an approximation at best, which possibly takes several months to a year to average out reasonably, whereas a lot of the research focuses on results over 3 months or less.
I'd bet a fair amount that your Mass General study used self reported calorie intake.
800kcals a day is typically enough for a 100 lb person to lose nearly a half a pound of fat a week. That's low calorie by most people's measure. Certainly mine at 200lbs
When most people are talking about 'losing weight' they mean losing fat. At least losing actual body tissue. Anyone can gain or lose 10% of their body weight in a few days by controlling for carbs. But its just water.
Try to ignore rat studies if you possibly can. Their metabolism, particularly their capacity for denovo lipogenisis is very very different than that of human beings.
> I'd bet a fair amount that your Mass General study used self reported calorie intake.
99% of nutrition studies are, but this one wasn't. I can't find the reference now, though.
Personally, I've been on a ~1200kcal/day diet for years (for some of that time, I did very detailed tracking), and stayed at my 220lbs. Which, of course, makes no sense, and it didn't to my girlfriend at the time who was an MD - so she decided she'd show me how wrong I am by eating the same as me. She lost weight quickly and started blacking out (apparently some form of malnutrition) within a few days, and stopped after a week with a SEP field resolution ("Contradicts everything I know, so I'm just going to ignore it").
Then, 12 month ago, on essentially the same diet, I started gaining weight - slowly but surely. And then I decided to cut away wheat, and lost 30 pounds within a month. (In retrospect, I also noticed that my gain weight coincided with going from pure-egg protein powder to egg-and-wheat protein powder).
There are about a thousand more variables than calories, and the body can change its efficiency.
Ignore the rat studies if you like, but cabanac has similar experiments with humans -- basically, people fed through a nose tube lose weight almost independently of the amount of calories you put in their stomach. Body just doesn't use the food unless proper signaling (apparently, scent related) happens.
So, for the uninformed peanut gallery, beagle3 is just plain wrong. Probably not intentionally, he's likely also fooling himself. But you locked him in a room and measured his food for him and really only fed him 1200kcals per day, even at a fairly sedentary level of exercise, a 220lb man would lose a lot of fat mass over several weeks. And no beagle3, human bodies tend to be very greedy with calories and do a good job absorbing them regardless of what you smell.
What likely happened is that reducing carbs reduced beagle3's appetite and he ate less. Unless...
...unless beagle3 has a magic body that has never once been seen in any controlled experiment. But he probably does, since every dieter who has problems believes they have a special body that science can't explain. So they buy a book and a program from someone who tells them what they want to hear. And if their guru is on their game they sell very very expensive supplements.
Because its a well known scientific fact that the first law of thermodynamics applies to everything in the universe except a disgruntled dieter.
Taubes is a quack, pure and simple. Most of the studies he cites that I'm familiar with use self reported food intake. Any study that uses self reported food intake should be entirely disregarded for physiological purposes (perhaps useful for studying psychology).
You can get razor sharp lean on a diet with lots of carbs in it and you can get nice and fat on a ketogenic diet.
No controlled calorie study supports the idea that carbs, fats or proteins have any particular metabolic advantage over the minor differences in their thermic effects of feeding (TEF) (essentially energy required to digest).
I'm a paleo guy and I agree with what you wrote, but I'm uncomfortable with stating it with such certainty. Personally, when I'm evaluating a fringe idea one thing I look for is modesty in the people proposing it. When a proponent speaks with too much certainty it smells of quackery.
The sad thing is that while Taubes is a quack and his book title is quackery, he probably is 40 years more up to date than many nutrition or medical professionals.
USDA sucks pretty bad.
It may well be wrong, but it is based on more research and science than the list 60 years of mainstream nutrition advice (I dare not use the word "science", and neither would any scientist who actually read publication in the field)
As for modesty - that would not help his cause, whether that cause is educating others or making more money. What are you more likely to read, something titled "Most of what you know about nutrition is wrong", or "A humble suggestion to ignore nutritionists"?
